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segunda-feira, 25 de fevereiro de 2013

Star payers. I love them!

I love star
players in the game of blood bowl. My gaming club, "The Thursday Night Heroes",
love star players. Yeah, I know the stars are not that hip these days, but I
think they add another layer of fluff and fun to our game.

When the 2nd
edition hit the game stores, our club started to take the league a lot more
seriously. By that, I don't mean ‘win at all costs’, or ‘find the best star on
the list and get him’, what I mean is, we started to run our league twice a year
and it got to be quite the ‘game about town’. At our peak, we had about 30-35
coaches vying for the "old tin jug". We had new faces at the start of every
season (we always play set format like the NHL/NFL, none of this ‘lets see who
turns up’, nonsense), and it got to the point that we were using the town rec
hall because the FLGS or our basements were not big enough, no brag, fact. The
GW supply guy at our FLGS said we ran the biggest league on the east coast of
the US in
the years 1995-98.

These days, we
have between 15-22 players each season (now in our 36th). We have a bunch of
things most leagues don't; between game stuff, star players, trades etc. We have
a file index with about 225 star players. These are from many sources: the 'net,
official GW sources, home grown stars etc, you get the idea. They are all
pointed as per JJ's formula, and they are bought for a team sorta like 3rd
edition, you buy the player and he's yours until:

-he gets
killed

-he gets an
injury and he’s released

-he's
traded

-some between
game mayhem gets in the way

Once that star
is chosen, as he’s unique, he plays for your team until one of the
above...

As our league
doesn’t play teams past the current season, the stars are put back in the pool
before the next season. It’s been working for very nearly 22 years. I see them
as a part of the game. The stars don't over balance the game as they can fall
victim just like a common lineman. I have found that most coaches are very vocal
about NOT using star players. Broken, is the cool way of describing stars. For
the life of me, I just don't see how a Star Player bothers Blood Bowl. I mean to say, you have x amount of gold
to buy y (players, rerolls, apoth, cheerleaders, etc). If I ‘waste’ gold on a
star player, yeah, he’s got a bunch of "plusses", but he can't advance and he’s
a "spp" sink. He’s also just as fragile as any non star player. I’ve had a star
player killed on turn 2 of game 1 in one of our seasons.

Anyway, we like
them. Now, if I could just get people to help me get a painted figure for each
of our stars. Out of about 225, we have, in our club (which means my massive
collection, mostly) about 150 already painted. I try to get a few more done
every month.